Parallelization of Garbage Collection in a Ccp System, Penny

An important property of logic, object-oriented, functional, and other high-level programming languages is their automatic management of dynamically allocated storage. These languages often take the burden of memory management away from the programmer. The language support system provides the programmer with a virtually unlimited amount of storage by running a garbage collector to reclaim storage no longer needed. The goal of this article is to present implementation and evaluation of a parallel garbage collection scheme used in a parallel concurrent constraint programming system called, Penny, running on a shared memory multiprocessors machine. Our parallel garbage collector employs multiple collectors working in parallel to make eecient use of the underlying architecture. Four strategies have been investigated, these strategies range from a sequential strategy to a full parallel one.